Waianai

Someone decided to give Mercy Ships another ship outright. It was about a third of the size of the Anastasis yet was in much better shape than the Anastasis had been when we got her. It still needed some renovations and support needed to be raised. It was called The Petite Forte and it was located in Jacksonville, Florida. Don Stephens asked my parents if they would move there to be the leaders and they agreed. Since I only had one more year of school, I wanted to stay in Hawaii to finish it out. My parents decided to leave me under the supervision of the Stephens family.

The families from the ship relocated to yet another amazing place to live. It was a Seventh-Day Adventist camp way out in the lesser developed part of the west coast of Oahu, all the way up the back of Waianai Valley. The camp had a kitchen/eating/meeting hall, a bathroom building and seven sleeping cabins, all in a semi-circle around a field with a large tree in the middle. At the back of the camp rose a large hill which was an offshoot of the Waianai mountains further behind the camp. The location was idyllic. If you climbed up the hill (which I often did), you could look down the valley to the vast blue ocean and up the valley to the incredible sharp verdant mountain peaks. 

As I had been more introverted and Samuel more extroverted, he had always been the one at the center of attention. Now that his graduating class had left, I became the oldest in the school. The other kids began to look to me for more leadership and it forced me to start coming out of myself.

We did our schoolwork in the dining hall but in the morning we would meet under the large tree in the field. This being Hawaii, there were plenty of bugs, including centipedes. Hawaii is home to a variety of centipedes. Two of the most common are large red ones and small blue ones. Guess which ones have more venom? One day, while we were under the tree, a small blue one dropped onto one of the girls and stung her. While their stings are not deadly, that was not a good day for her. 

Once again, I lived in a tent. There was another field behind the cabins where they set up tents for a few people who didn’t fit in the cabins. Since I was alone, they gave me one of those small dome tents to live in by myself. I didn’t have much stuff - a suitcase, a bag and my boombox.

On a pretty regular basis, the wind would get funneled into the valley and come whipping through the camp. One day we were in school and here it came. This time it seemed stronger than usual. Someone yelled that my tent was rolling. I ran back to see it tumbling across the field with my boombox and all. Miraculously, it didn’t get broken.

I listened to a lot of music there in the camp. Sometimes we would all hang out together under the tree and listen to the top forty on Sundays but I also had a lot of time by myself. I started to buy music too. My parents gave me a small allowance so I had a little money. At first I bought music by Christian singers – Steve Taylor, Sheila Walsh, Michael W. Smith. But then I started buying music by non-Christians – Yes, Journey, Men at Work and it started to become an obsession - an idol.

Idols are things that become more important than what is really important. In this case, music was becoming more important to me than God. Over the next few weeks, God gently convicted me of my idolatry and I began to purge parts of my small collection of tapes.